Weaponising a Heat Wave in Iraq
Who is responsible for the collapse of the Iraqi power grid during a scorching heatwave?
On the 1st of July, temperatures in the Iraqi city of Basra reached 51 degrees. Residents were left to cool themselves any way they could in the searing heat, the rich with air conditioning, the poor making do with fans or buckets of water.
Then the power went out.
And then the water too…
In a cascading failure much of southern Iraq, and even parts of Baghdad were left without basic services for hours, or in many cases days, during a near-record heatwave. The death toll from the heat alone will be immense (if it is ever tallied), and the breakdown of services essential to human life is already driving further instability within the country.
“It’s like Iraq is facing the open doors of hell,” Samir Mohammed Khalid, an Arabic teacher in Baghdad told The National. “We can’t stay indoors because of the electricity outages and a lack of drinking water, and we can’t go shopping. In both cases, you are being tortured.”
But why did this happen?
The Iraqi Government has, for its part, blamed sabotage. Representatives of the Ministry of Energy noted that “in just nine days, 31 power lines were targeted with explosives”. The group blamed for these attacks was Islamic State (IS). If this was the case, it raises a disturbing possibility - that IS was exploiting a heatwave that some have linked to climate change to do massive damage to the civilian population of Iraq.
There is limited information available on the location of these power lines that were allegedly bombed, however open-source information on these bombings can be obtained from the various Facebook pages of the Electricity Transmission Company of Iraq. The images and location information provided therein can be cross-referenced with maps of the Iraqi power grid, and used to create approximate locations of the documented bombings targetting power lines.
The locations of these bombings can be seen below, lain over a network map of the Iraqi power grid. Notably, the grid map is an approximate network map based on 2017 data. A more accurate open-source map of the exact transmission line locations can be found here.
From the above map, two things become immediately apparent. Firstly, while there appears to have been a systematic attempt to attack large 400kV powerlines in Iraq over the last week, the scale of this has been overstated by the government. Rather than 31 bombings, there appears to have been only 6 discrete events. Secondly, the attacks appear to be located exclusively in the north and the west of the country, in Sunni areas where IS has a historic support base.
While these attacks are certainly a cause for alarm, and in many ways represent a weaponisation of climate change by IS, they do not explain the near-total power failure that Iraq experienced on July 2. Instead, evidence points to another culprit - Iran.
Much of Iraq’s power supply depends on natural gas-powered generators and, despite being a hydrocarbon-rich country, Iraq imports much of the gas for these generators from Iran. Iraq however has been struggling to pay for this gas, and Iran claims that Iraq is $4bn behind on payments. As a result of this, Iran cut Iraq’s gas supply last week, according to reporting by the Associated Press.
Iranian gas enters Iraq through two pipelines used to power plants in Basra, Samawa, Nasiryah and Diyala. Furthermore, Iran also supplies electricity directly to Iraq through four powerlines, mostly in the south of the country. While one of these lines (Diyala - Mersud) was bombed by IS, on July 4, Ministry of Electricity data noted that in late June the output of these lines was zero. The fact that the blackout began in the south of Iraq, before spreading to the north lends credence to the theory that the cutoff of gas supplies was to blame for the blackout.
“Gas imports from Iran range from 1.5-1.8 billion cubic feet per day. Now, we see generation in the south collapsing below 1 (gigawatt), meaning not just these lines are offline but even gas flow is down,” said Yesar al-Maleki, Gulf analyst at the Middle East Economic Survey, according to AP.
Given that the above, it would seem that the Iranian government instead used the heatwave to inflict maximum pressure on Iraq to pay. Moreover, the move could also be seen as an attempt to punish Iraqi for attempting to diversify its energy supplies away from Iran, both towards nuclear power as well as other gas exporters.
In summary, the blackout in Iraq was a human tragedy that was cynically created to take advantage of a natural disaster (the heatwave). While the IS bombings of transmission lines in the north may have worsened the situation, and pose a serious threat to the Iraqi power grid, they do not explain a blackout starting in the country’s south. Instead, the blame for the blackout must fall on Iran, as well as for the likely large number of deaths that it caused. More broadly speaking, the event serves as a warning for how climate change can expose states with weak infrastructure to asymmetric attack by both state and non-state actors.